Married actors 'giggly' over first onscreen kiss

NEW YORK -- Michael Emerson has played a serial killer, a mysterious, villainous Island leader and currently stars as a billionaire computer genius on Person of Interest. But he says playing the romantic interest for his real-life wife has been his most unsettling role.

Emerson plays the offbeat Harold Finch in the TV series Person of Interest, which airs Thursday nights. His wife Carrie Preston has a recurring role as Finch's former fiancée, who believes he is dead.

AP

Carrie Preston, left, and Michael Emerson.

The couple has acted together in a few independent films, and Preston even played Emerson's mother in an episode of ABC's Lost, but this was their first romantic pairing. This season even showed the characters' first kiss.

"Neither of us are the kind to get a lot romantic work in front of the camera, so for us to get a big old languid first kiss with music underneath it and everything -- that's a first in my career," he said.

Emerson said having his wife play his love interest can be tricky: "It's a little hard to turn off her wife-ness to me to make her just this other character."

Preston, who also appears in True Blood and The Good Wife, also found working with him a little strange but that nothing was more bizarre for them than watching the kiss on TV.

"We both sat and watched it together at home on the sofa and we got all kind of giggly and shy about it. It was like we didn't know how to look at each other," he said. "It's like, 'Oh God, there we are. We're kissing.'"

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